The Hounds of Love

Or something like that…

I’ve just been reading a Western Daily Press leader column on equal marriage and repealing the hunting ban – ie one thing the Government didn’t say they would do, and are doing, and the other thing they said they would do and are not even trying. They’re not happy about it.

There are quite a few poor lines of argument in this piece – eg saying that only 0.1% of the population would be interested in having a gay marriage. You can think the principle of equal marriage is important without wanting to have one yourself. You might even be married to someone of the opposite sex and think it’s important. I can’t see why that’s so hard for the WDP to get its head round.

They then move onto talking about hunting and say this. “In the English countryside, where the Tories are by far the strongest party, a majority of people of all classes are in favour of hunting.”

This simply isn’t true, as the League Against Cruel Sports will tell you. Even in the countryside a majority of people are against hunting. It’s very much a minority pastime. The pro-shooting lobby will also, in a similar vein, try to tell you that more than a million people in the UK take part in shooting each year. I’d really like to see where they get those figures from.

The fact is, polling shows that the public supports equal marriage (or isn’t bothered very much either way) and is against hunting. The WDP is of course free to argue its case but it shouldn’t pretend the public is on its side when it’s not.

Comments

How appalling of the WDP to make out that the majority of people in the countryside support chasing and ripping apart British wildlife in the name of entertainment. No evidence at all for this claim which seeks to create a totally artificial divide between town and country. The fact is the WDPs much cherished ‘free vote’ on hunting is not going to get off the ground because there is not a majority in the Commons in support of hunting with dogs. The WDP and its few allies are still outdated and out voted. Get used to it WDP, your time is over.
Will you be calling for a free vote on bear baiting next?

Will this local paper be exempted from any legislation arising from Leveson I wonder? As someone who suffered from bias in what I’m pretty sure was a local paper in the same group I’ve read with some queasiness remarks from Labour MPs re how their wonderful local papers “aren’t like that” as my daughters used to say of young men whom they trusted.
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The notion that the local and regional media are sans pareil deserves ridicule, and if national media are more tightly regulated, even voluntarily, while local is not, local will become a leader in abuse as the net has.
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The online versions of newspapers need bringing into a degree of control beyond the possibility of libel actions etc.
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I gather Finland has laws which insist on corrections of equal prominence and length of the original newspaper lies. As per Labour talk in the 1980s, when the Glasgow Media Group kept track of some of our national media.
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Why are such restrictions unlikely to appeal to Rothermere, the Barclays, Murdoch and other foreign resident UK media moguls? Oh … Freedom to lie is part of the inheritances they paid for?